Bernad Munos at CIP Forum

Bernard Munos, Strategic thinker at Eli Lilly, reflects on openness as a benefit for society. Bernard is writing about and promoting Open Innovation in the Life Science Industry.

Congratulations Jonas Kuschel

We congratulate Jonas Kuschel for earning the PhD in Informatics with the dissertation "Vehicle Services", Saturday the 19th of September, 2009. Good Job! Opponent was Tomas Hellström from Lund University.



ABSTRACT

This thesis contributes to our understanding of the development and diffusion of vehicle services, and to how information technology interacts with forms of organization and business models to undermine or support the development of vehicle services. The overall research question asked in the thesis is: what are the technical, business and organizational prerequisites for the development and diffusion of a rich variety of vehicle services? The development and diffusion of vehicle services have been empirically investigated by ethnographic field studies, prototype software development and case studies as part of a collaborative practice research approach involving the Volvo Group. Based on ethnographic field studies of current vehicle repair service work, analytical patterns were identified to better understand the core foundation of vehicle services. In the prototype development, a platform was developed, which allowed exploring the technical prerequisites for the development of vehicle services. Two case studies examined, first, the development of IT support for vehicle services and, secondly, the organization of vehicle service development. The results from all these collaborative practice research activities suggest that the vehicle industry needs to revise its conception of vehicle services as services extending product features in favor of vehicle services enriching the use of the vehicle. Thus, the thesis argues that the lack of vehicle services, rather than being just a question of technical nature, can only be remedied by a change of perspective from products to services, which in turn influences the choice of technology, forms of organization and underlying business models. Vehicle services are here conceptualized as services interacting across the ecosystem of vehicle stakeholders to enrich the customer’s use of the vehicle. Hence, to be really useful, vehicle services must roam organizational and technical boundaries and cannot be treated as properties of the vehicle. This requires vehicle manufacturers to adopt appropriate forms of technology and organization. The concept of information infrastructure is shown to be appropriate since it allows separating services from shared infrastructural resources. Such a separation also allows opening up the development of vehicle services to other service providers. Open innovation is described as a suitable form of opening up the innovation and development of vehicle services to a larger group of service providers. The thesis argues that these three prerequisites – business model, technology and organization – have to closely interact to facilitate the development and diffusion of a rich variety of vehicle services. The general contribution of the thesis is to show how product oriented industries have to revise their proprietary mindset in favor of an open attitude to successfully engage in the development of services.

Read more about the dissertation here.

Clay Shirky on Innovation in Mind

Listen to a audio from the presentation Clay Shirky held at the conference Innovation in Mind at Lund, Sweden 16th of september, 2009. The audio quality is a bit poor, but the content is good.

Clay Shirky is an well-known Internet Guru and has among others written the book "Here Comes Everybody - The Power of Organizing Without Organizations", discussing the changes in society as the new media landscape forms.

See more about Clay Shirky also on Youtube.

Innovation in mind - Lund, Sweden - Day 2

The second day of the conference Innovation in Lund started with three parallell tracks, consisting of 1) User innovation (Franke etc), 2) Open innovation (Chesbrough etc) and 3) Social innovation (Shirky etc). I finally took the choice of attending the Open Innovation track.

The session started with Christopher Lettl, from Vienna University, talking about user innovation in the medical technology area. Fascinating examples of surgents building fantastic and advanced robots and other tools, that have revolutionized industries, on user communities helping each other finding good solutions etc. Second was Mats Lindoff, who has a history from Ericsson and SonyEricsson, presenting the evolution of mobile phones. Mats argued that it needs a quite high amount of technology push until the infrastructure is developed enough to let users in. It took the telecom industry 20 years. Finally, Henry Chesbrough had a presentation on Open Innovation Business Models, highligting the business model as a key driver for generating profit. A "open" platform based business model such as Apple´s AppStore was pinpoined as the optimum, where outside actors spend thousands of research hours to bring in value to Apple´s platform.

After a short coffee break, some sessions about innovation strategies around the world were held, including Curtis Carlson from SRI International (Silicon Valley), Mu Ronping from Institute of Policy and Management from Bejing and after lunch Harvard Professor Amar Bhidé discussing the failure in the financial sector leading to the financial crisis.

The afternoon ended with two parallel sessions, with 1) discussions on how EI can support regional innovation strategies and 2) a younger generation of entrepreneurs discussing the future.

All in all, the event was very interesting. Especially the first day was enlighting and it is nice to listen to inspiring thoughts. True, it becomes evident from the various examples that the notions of Open Innovation and User Innovation are complex, not easily defined. Often the success stories of openness gets more attention and fascination than critical thoughts or failures. But the conference has anyway nurtured new ideas and relations that will hopefully develop over time.

Innovation in Mind - Lund, Sweden - Day 1

The conference Innovation in Mind had a fantastic first day. Bengt-Åke Lundwall (the guy behind the notion innovation system) had a presentation, followed by professor Henry Chesbrough talking about open innovation and Nikolaus Franke about user innovation. Their inspiring examples are captivating. After lunch, a passionate speach from entrepreneur Sahar Hashemi seduced the audience with a lifestory linked to the winding road of creating Coffee Republic in UK. Then Clay Shirky talked about the new media landscape in a very inspiring way - much thoughts are following the argumentation he has in the book "Here Comes Everyone" - about a networked society that do not ask for permission to interupt industries and businesses. The user-innovation guru Eric von Hippel was talking to the audience on videolink fråm MIT, and the day ended with a panel discussion and reflections. Wonderful event. Looking forward to tomorrow.

Reflections on CIP Forum Open Innovation Track

After months of preparation, CIP Forum 2009 finally took place, and it was great pleasure to meet up with all the interesting people within the Open Innovation Track.

We started on Sunday with Magnus Holmqvist from Volvo IT Innovation Centre, facilitating a workshop on Open Innovation in times of recession. Participating in the session was also Anna Nilsson-Ehle (SAFER), Joakim Fransson (Renova), Christian Björkman (Mindark), Jan Unander (Telematics Valley) and Björn Remneland (University of Gothenburg). The panel discussed various aspects of the open innovation approach, showing the multitude of definitions and use. A thought pointed out was that in times of recession, most probably companies that are close become even closer, but that it also is a potential opportunity for organizations to use the crisis in order to mobilize attention to the innovation areas.

On Monday, Bernard Munos from Eli Lilly had the keynote speech, discussing the need for change in the Life Science Industry, toward increased openness in the innovation processes. He showed in statistics that the rate of innovation has been stable for several decades, despite the advances in knowledge and technology. Something must be done, and Open Innovation might be the solution. He lifted up a couple of examples to emphasis this claim. Good speech, much interesting aspects were highlighted. We had the pleasure to mingle with Mr Munos at several occasions later in the Forum, and he clearly is a bright man. The Keynote was followed by a panel discussion, including Marshal Phelps (Microsoft), Noreen Krall (SUN), Ove Granstrand (Chalmers), and Bernard Munos again.

After lunch, Noreen Krall introduced the Open Innovation Specialization Track, and the first speaker, Keith Bergelt from Open Invention Network. The talk was about how OIN is established to protect Linux development to continue to thrive as an open source solution. It was followed by a wonderful panel discussion with Lucas Hulsmann (Procter & Gamble), Hans Persson (Volvo Technology), Bill Brox (Imego) and Mark Wilson (GlaxoSmithKline), showing how Open Innovation has affected business in many different industries, such as consumer market, automotive and life science.

A coffee break, mingling, and then Christian Björkman from Mindark had a presentation about their fascinating Project Entrophia, a virtual world with its own economy. Extremely interesting and thought provoking. These virtual worlds can be seen as platforms in itself, much like iPhone or other infrastructures – which open up for other actors to create amazing business on. A panel discussion about Open Source and Linux was followed, including Simon Phipps (SUN), Robert Tiller (RedHat) and Jan Ljungberg (IT university). Especially impressed by Mr Phipps pedagogical and professional discussions on why it is logical for participates to not steal the code. “Stealing is possible for usage, but not if being part of continuous development”.

They intensive day ended with a beautifully arranged speakers dinner at the fourth floor on Universeum, in a hall romantically facing a wall to a huge shark aquarium. Good relaxing discussions, and great fun.

Tuesday Open Innovation Track started with an Open Innovation Lunch, with special invited guests. Also here gave possibilities for building social ties. The first session, introduced by Mats Pårup, was Jako Eleveld, presenting Philips movement to Open Innovation. Philips is considered one of the forerunners in applying a IP-based approach to Open Innovation. A panel discussion followed, highlighting organizational challenges in the movement toward openness. Per Adamsson (Volvo Trucks) and Gustav Brismark (Ericsson) gave two perspectives on this process from two different industries. For general discussions, Lucas Hulsmann (P&G) and Mark Wilson (GlaxoSmithKline) also joined. It was clear that the process to Open Innovation is not an easy task. Companies face challenges in organizational structure, culture, technology, intellectual property and a vast number of other areas.

After coffee, Claudio Marinelli from Nokia, had a very inspiring presentation where he presented research on measurements done in Nokia regarding how openness affects innovation in practice. The numbers showed strong correlation between open innovation and productivity as well as innovation. Would be wonderful to hear more about this study in the future.

On the evening, CIP Forum had a closing dinner at Eriksbergshallen with nice food, good entertainment and well deserved highlights on the people making the event a possibility. For the Open Innovation Track, this is specially directed to Noreen Krall, who has done a wonderful job of arranging the Open Innovation Track, with help from the CIP team.

Gov 2.0 - Tim O´Rielly on the next generation of Government

Tim O´Rielly, founder of O´Rielly Media and the person who is said to have coined the notion of Web 2.0, has a guest posting in TechCrunchs blog, introducing the Gov 2.0, thinking about government as a platform. Interesting thoughts, and in line with the notion of full democracy, with participating and engaged public.

Read the blog post here:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/04/gov-20-its-all-about-the-platform/

Web 2.0 Global Survey Result from McKinsey

In the McKinsey September newsletter, the result of a three year Global Survey on Web 2.0 is summarized. Nearly 1,700 executives from around the world, across a range of industries and functional areas, answered this years survey. 69 % of the respondents answer that they have benefited from the application of Web 2.0 technologies.

“When we asked respondents about the business benefits their companies have gained as a result of using Web 2.0 technologies, they most often report greater ability to share ideas; improved access to knowledge experts; and reduced costs of communications, travel, and operations. Many respondents also say Web 2.0 tools have decreased the time to market for products and have had the effect of improving employee satisfaction."

Thank you Malin for the link :)

Read more on McKinsey Quarterly